The Oregon Symphony had pianist Jon Kimura Parker back in town to help kick off its subscription season over the weekend, and while Carlos Kalmar and the orchestra played gracious host to their guest while he was at the keyboard, they reserved a fair bit of the evening's limelight for themselves.

A favorite of Portland audiences and a genial presence on stage, Parker offered a crystalline performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20, with power and drama suited to the music's minor mood and frequent storminess but also with effortless bright energy in its virtuosic solo part. As is often the case with his most intensely dramatic music (parts of "Don Giovanni," for example, which share the concerto's D minor modality), Mozart conveyed emotion and drama while also drawing you to how brilliantly he himself was pulling the whole thing off. Parker's fleet runs, pristine ornaments and magnificent cadenzas gave the same sense; however portentous the material, the playing was still a joy.

Balance was nicely modulated, both between soloist and ensemble (though orchestral swells threatened to swamp the piano at times) and between Parker's hands.

In the concerto as well as in the encore, Mozart's Rondo "alla Turca," even the simplest figures in the left hand emerged clearly again the densest textures in the right. Kalmar led the orchestra in gracious, responsive and carefully shaped accompaniment.

After intermission, the night belonged to the orchestra, and the players were in top form. They led off with Andrew Norman's "Drip" (an abbreviation of the original title, "Drip, Blip, Sparkle, Spin, Glint, Glide, Glow, Float, Flop, Chop, Pop, Shatter, Splash"), a giddy four minutes of near-mayhem with an impish vibe akin to Carl Stalling's soundtracks for Warner Brothers cartoons. Made like a tossed salad, according to Norman, the piece consists of fragments ranging from blaring trombones to individual notes on a solitary woodblock thrown together in seemingly random fashion. Like Stalling's work, it was genuinely funny (there was laughter in the audience, a rare occurrence at a symphony concert) but also complex and technically challenging. The performance was as tight as the construction of the piece itself.

They went on to an enthralling reading of Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances," an exercise in wringing the maximum sumptuous tone color from the orchestra. As in the Mozart, tempos seemed perfectly calibrated--especially the slow movement, which was just fast enough to maintain buoyant energy and forward motion but slow enough to give a sense of lingering over every delicious harmony and sonority. Sections and soloists shone: the low strings were darkly radiant, the percussion incisive and the brass solidly focused. Captivating individual contributions were abundant, notable those of principal flute Jessica Sindell, new concertmaster Sarah Kwak and the uncredited saxophonist (Kim Reece, if I'm not mistaken).

The program, which also included Hugo Alfvén's "Midsommarvaka" ("Midsummer's Vigil," also known as the Swedish Rhapsody No. 1) was all over the map, but the music was both gorgeous and viscerally thrilling -- well worth checking out in its last performance if you're free Monday night.